You must have watched a different Oreily that I did. The numbers he showed proved his point. The solution is that the Legislature will pass a law requiring them to pay a small amunt on their pensions and health care while leaving collective bargaining on wages intact.
Pensions and health care are substitutes for wages. Cutting them is cutting wages.
Here’s the link to O’ Reilly’s memo
Click me and the breakdown I came up with based on his numbers:
O’ Reilly says:
Public Worker Salary= 48K a year
Public Worker Pension= 1, 718 a month (20,616 a year)
Private Worker Salary: 70K a year
Private Worker Pension: 1, 307 (15,684 a year)
It all depends on how you figure it. If both workers work for 40 years and then retire making those salaries, it’s pretty obvious that the private worker made a lot (well 30% more or so) more money than the public worker.
Public Worker: 48K multiplied by 40= 1, 920, 000
Private Worker: 70K multiplied by 40= $2,800,000
Quite a bit more. The only way the public worker eats into that lead is through that $5,000 a year difference in pension money, which he can only collect when he is retired. If his retirement is absurdly lengthy (as is the case in parts of California where some people are reported to have been retired for 50 years and have 100K pensions), he can make up the difference over several decades. If he retires and dies 10 years later, he didn’t even come close to evening things out. That’s the scam with pensions and social security; they only work if most people die soon enough. That’s why they should have never been instituted, but that’s another thread about progressives and control.
So, no, O’Reilly’s own numbers prove that private workers still make quite a bit more than public workers; therefore the solution is for the governor to accept the budget cuts and solve the budget without union busting. Health care and pensions are forms of “wages”. If they need cutting because the state was irresponsible or an emergency came up, then the unions seem willing to do it.
I know unions have become corrupt; I don’t think they have the right to force people to join them. But there has to be a line drawn for workers, and ceding the governor and the legislature this kind of power is a throwback to the days of Rockefeller buying politicians and baseball bat thugs bashing workers who wanted more than 5 cents a day. No thanks.
And remember that it’s okay that public workers make less than private workers because job security is supposed to account for the pay differential.
